Appending, Adding, Tracks and Titles and using result in VLC

Help
1

Hi,
I need some basic help to create a single MKV that shall contain the two parts of a concert and the Bonus Material, I am probably mixing up some concepts and terminology.

I was able to append the concert track from track2_1 (1h) to track1_1 (1.5h), and the result is fine. Then I add the bonus material track1_2 (30mins). Their formats are different, so I can’t append the bonus material track1_2 at the end of track2_1.

The resulting mkv has length 1+1.5=2.5h, so missing the Bonus material. In VLC I can select the second video “track”, and I get those images, while the audio of the concert keeps playing.

=> How can I have both concert and bonus in one *.mkv, and select in VLC one or the other ? Is that possible in mkv at all, like in a DVD ? Or will I end up with two *.mkv files in the end ?

Thx in advance,
Steffen

2

Welcome!

Please read this FAQ entry first. It explains the difference between “adding” & “appending” in depth.

On to your actual ussue: if you want content to appear one after the other, “appending” is the right thing to do. Unfortunately there are limitations: as appended tracks are appended into a single track[1], the content must adhere to Matroska’s specifications. And those state that you cannot change the fundamental track properties mid-stream. These include but aren’t limited to the resolution (for video tracks), the sampling frequency (for audio tracks) and the codec in general. Therefore if you have content with different characteristics, you cannot append them without re-encoding at least one part of the content to append.

  1. in the sense that if you have two source files, each with one video & two audio tracks, you won’t end up with a destination file with six tracks in total, but with three in total: one video track, one audio track containing the audio from the first audio tracks of both source files and a second audio track containing the audio from the second audio tracks of both source files. ↩︎